This blog will comprise a collection of ephemera, mess and miscellaneous artifacts reflecting on the writer's life.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

What shall I post today?

This is a major preoccupation with every blogger.How do we decide what to post?Sometimes events take us up and we post something that happened to us.

A good example of this is Dr Rob's ill- fated trip to the hairdresser.Dr Joolz takes a lot of inspiration from Flickr and this makes her blog very visual which I love.Anya explores digital affordances and responds to what she does and sees which is great.Sometimes we get ideas from each other, and I think that is what memes are.I tend to think about my blog on the train, and write down my ideas in a little notebook Dr Joolz got me.Sometimes I wake up and think about my blog before anything else (is that sad).Blogs occupy an interesting space, as they weave in and out of our daily lives and preoccupations.Sometimes I follow a train of thought or a pattern.Do we plan our posts?Or are they more random, and depend upon the ephemera of the everyday?I think of my blog structure a bit like beads on a chain but sometimes I switch chains.

4 comments:

Interesting to think about blog structure. Guy and I have talked about it as a 3D patchwork; individual posts use scraps from elsehwere - scraps of ideas and links to text. But it is 3D as in fact other texts become part of your text and vice versa. This happens in books through qutations (that 'Bakhtinian Buzz')but somehow it is qualitatively different in a blog as you go to the REAL text via the link and can journey on so easily from there. The reader is so much more active and this impacts on the meaning of the way we structure out texts and how our structure works. Ooops sorry. Went n a bit too much.

for me blogging alternates between thinking of the idea or picture first and starting with a blank post and deciding what to say.. DrJoolz have you got study leave? wow. And I love the hat you are wearing on Guy's blog today!

I'm really interested in the way blogs evolve. When I read this post I started thinking back to your 'manifesto' when you started. We all seem to do this - say that our blog will be about this, that and the other - yet as time goes along we end up starting new themes, threads and ideas, changing what we post, our posting voice, and even the look of our blogs. Sometimes our response to the textual and social affordances changes too...and then, perhaps, in an emerging affinity space, the comments we attract change, get lengthier and so on and the text seems to take on a life of its own.